I would like to the second the recommendation by John Gent. I down loaded the TTFtoDXF program and spent a week dissecting a SmartCam font file to figure out how they work. (The help file for creating custom fonts leaves allot out!) This is what I've learned: The font file consists of geometry for each letter and a "user command" at the origin of each letter. The user command contains the letter from the keyboard you want to associate your geometry with. This is all in the help file but what the help file does not tell you is that the distance from each "user command" to the next is what determines your character spacing. ( The gentleman with the engraving problem can modify his font file to the spacing he wants and never have to worry about again! ) If you start with 1" high characters for your capital letters in your font file and scale the lowercase accordingly than your text height will scale properly in SmartCam. I also discovered that each row of letters ends with a "blank" user command, this sets the character space for the last letter in the row. I also noticed at the end of the first row there was an extra user command this is for the "space" in the character set. The user command at the start of the "space" contains the "space bar character" and the distance to the last user command in the row sets how big your space is. One other thing, the sequence of the entities is important, the first user command must be followed by all the geometry in sequence for that letter. The sequence of the geometry also determines the sequence of the code file.
I hope this my help someone out there! I have ported 4 True type fonts to SmartCam so far and it's getting easier for each one. A few tips for the TTFtoDXF program. The higher you set the resolution for the bigger the DXF & font file and the slower it is to user in SmartCam. 2 or 3 for the resolution seemed to give pretty good results. I tried one at 10 and the DXF conversion in SmartCam crashed with too many entities. Set the Scale in TTFtoDXF to give a 1" high character for your Capital letters. I left the space and pitch at the defaults ( 10 & -2.0 ) This gave good results in font file and You just have to add the user commands. > Hans, > > This was posted somewhere, sometime, by somebody, but I can't remember who it > was so my apologies for the lack of attribution. > > Here is a fully functional demo that works really great. It's well worth the the > $100 (US). > http://hometown.aol.com/gcodemcode/index.htm > > Hans-Juergen Steinmetz wrote: > > > Good morning gentleman, > > We are trying to engrave on our milling machine by using Smartcam > > Advanced Production Milling. Since MS-Word has a lot of font options we > > thought we could use these. Does anyone know how to import text from a > > word document into Smartcam or Autocad for engraving purposes? > > Hans > > > > -- > > Hans-J�rgen Steinmetz > > Mechanical Engineering Department > > University of Saskatchewan > > 57 Campus Drive > > Saskatoon, SK > > Canada, S7H 1E8 > > Phone: 306-966-5459 > > Fax: 306-966-5427 > > > > ====================================================================== > > To find out more about this mailing list including how to unsubscribe, > > send the message "info mfg-smartcam" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > ====================================================================== > > -- > John Gent > Structural Dynamics Research Corporation > Americas Support Center - Eugene > > The secret of life is nothing at all. - Gretchen Peters > > > ====================================================================== > To find out more about this mailing list including how to unsubscribe, > send the message "info mfg-smartcam" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ====================================================================== > > Jim Schellpfeffer Machine Dev. & Maint. Group [EMAIL PROTECTED] (630)840-4029 ====================================================================== To find out more about this mailing list including how to unsubscribe, send the message "info mfg-smartcam" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================================
